Setting a new year’s resolution is like a ‘must-have’ thing nowadays. As an entrepreneur, new year’s resolution would be meaningless if there isn’t anything that is related to growth and expansion, but is that true?
I believe setting new resolutions for a new year isn’t difficult, so long you have done a good job in the evaluation of the past year. Imagine if you went for a weightlifting session without referring to your past records, that could be very dangerous.
Before we talk about setting new year’s resolutions, why don’t we look at how we could evaluate the past to set a solid foundation for the new resolutions?
Basically, there are 4 key questions you need to answer:
1. What have you started last year which you’ve failed to complete?
Many entrepreneurs are ambitious in setting goals and targets. To make sure they achieve the goal, they will introduce new tools, initiatives and plans. In most cases, these are introduced in a very haphazard manner. I.e without proper study and thorough thinking. At the end, the money is spent and these become white elephants.
A typical example of this would be the introduction of the ERP System. For entrepreneurs who have the extra budget, it’s quite natural for them to look into a system where the data is captured in all levels and meaningful information could be produced with a click of a button. Nevertheless, most ERP system were done without careful study, coupled with unreasonable expectations from users which it may not be able to cater in the first place. This results in delays of implementation.
Before you blame the Project Manager for the failure of implementation, perhaps you should sit down to understand the reasons that caused him/her to fail. Pushing to meet the deadline may have ended with a half cooked system. Maybe you have chosen the wrong software? Wrong consultant? Are the users non cooperative? Were unreasonable timelines given? etc.
Understanding the root cause of the current failure will prevent you from setting wrong/unreasonable goals or targets for the future.
2. What went well last year which you wish to continue this year?
This is a very straight forward question. You may have initiated new strategy last year which gave you good results. For example, promotion of products via Social Media gave you a 50% increase in sales compared to the traditional media. Don’t you want to repeat this in the new year? Before you get too excited and start to allocate more budget this year, you may also want to look into factors that made your strategy succeed. What happened last year may not happen again this year, there are seasonal factors, technological factors or even political factors that could change the outcome. Look into this carefully before you jump in with high expectations.
The same strategy may not give you the same outcome, don’t just implement an/the equation, be analytical.
 3. What went wrong last year, which you must not do this year?
I’m sure there were some bad decisions last year, and you swore to god that you won’t do it again in future. Well, you’ve learnt your lesson, you’ve paid the tuition fee, and most importantly you know what these bad decisions were. Write it down instead of keeping it in your heart, these bad decisions sure have something in common. The bad decisions would usually be made due to the following reasons:
Emotion – Either you became over excited or you made a blunder out of anger. We all know Emotional Quotient is essential for entrepreneurs, as any bad decision made out of emotion should never happened. Never commit to anything when you are excited and never make any decision when you are angry.
Do what you want to do – Compared to “do what you need to do”, these two have big differences in business. Many young entrepreneurs can’t differentiate “wants” and “needs”. Things that you want may not necessarily be needed in your business and things that are usually not needed are actually not important. So why spend time on things that are not important? Just because you like it? Come on, this is business my friend.
Not focused – Especially with young entrepreneurs, most are easily carried away with many new opportunities that comes along. I’m sure you come across someone who offered “I’m starting a new venture, are you interested?“. You start to split your time to work on something that you are not so familiar with. Unless your existing business has reached a mature stage and you have a capable team to run it without your involvement, please stay focus on your existing business. I do agree that some people are good in multitasking, but if you can get easily carried away, that means you are not one of them.
Others – I will end up with ten pages if I continue to write. You know your mistake, so make sure you don’t repeat them in the new year.
 4. What you could’ve done better last year?
This simply means “your best is not good enough” or “you are not consistent”. There were good strategies and plans which you had executed well, but you were happy with the achievement and didn’t pursue further opportunity. Give you an example, if Google approached you, to train their Sales Team in Malaysia, say 1 year contract, worth RM500,000. Are you happy? yes of course. But is that all? Could you have counter proposed to Google to train all their sales staffs from South East Asia with the same budget, via online platform with a condition, in exchange of 5 years contract instead of 1 year? Possible?
A good entrepreneur should have the ability to “smell” opportunities. It does come with some level of risk but risks are meant to be managed – not meant to be avoided. So you shouldn’t worry too much on things that you’ve done, you should worry about things that you didn’t do.
Once the above 4 questions are answered, we should then move forward to set new targets and goals. We shall discuss this in the next post; stay tuned.
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